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(Just to clarify – I am not one, and this is my personal opinion, having worked years in a department full of physicists, and with a background in non-physics fields. This is not after any discussion with other physicists in my dept – they might agree, they might not)

There was a major announcement back in March that results from BICEP2, a telescope sitting in the South Pole, showed evidence of cosmic inflation. This was, at the time, considered a Nobel Prize worthy discovery – I rounded up a few links on this back then.

The sun sets behind BICEP2 (in the foreground) and the South Pole Telescope (in the background). (Steffen Richter, Harvard University)

However, recently new results from Planck, a space telescope run by the European Space Agency, showed that the patterns in cosmic wave background detected by BICEP2 are likely just space dust.

The reason you are seeing all these in the public is because physicists are known to be open about their research results. There is no (or very little) “I am hiding this so that I can get rich off it” or “I think someone else is going to scoop my research.” Data are often shared as soon as they are available via the open access arXiv. People make results open so that others can criticize it. So that the public can better understand science. So the field as a whole can progress as much and as fast as possible. In fact, there was already some talk about data sharing between the BICEP2 and the Planck team. Physicists are years, if not decades, ahead of other fields in the openness and rapidness in sharing information.

The team involved has been criticised for publishing results before they were peer reviewed. But this is what science is: debate, discussion, deliberation.

This is also what makes science interesting. It is constantly changing, not static; it is the collective knowledge, not lines of facts. As mentioned by Astrophysicist Mario Livio,

As disappointing as these new results may sound, they provide for a powerful demonstration of how science truly progresses. Advances in science are far from being a direct march to the truth. Rather, they consist of a zigzag path that often results in false starts or blind alleys. The important point, however, is that through continuous checks, testable predictions, and new observations, science is able to self-correct and find the right way.

One Response to “How space dust teaches us about scientific progresses”

I think a lot of people are used to science as a point of authority, and they associate authority with definitive stamps… because the fact that 3 anonymous people stamped your research “accepted with minor revisions” somehow means something useful? People forget that the first point of any enterprise worth participating in, be it religious, philosophical, social, or scientific is critical discourse. Results need to be judged on their own merit and not by a stamp of authority

Of course, that means we can’t really come to meaningful judgement about most results and have to suspend judgement. This makes people feel powerless. Since they hate feeling powerless, they opt to instead rely on authority: “well, it was published in Nature”. If people were taught to overcome this need for false certainty then maybe they could understand science better, and understand how physics proceeds and why preprints (and blogs!) are great. [On a more philosophical note, I argue that most scientists themselves promote a certain aura of false certainty through the use of probability within their community]

On a second philosophical note, this is a good example not only of the social aspects of science, but also of theory-laden observation and how it leads us to revise what we thought was ‘fact’ before.